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Related papers: Primal-Dual Cops and Robber

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We examine a version of the Cops and Robber (CR) game in which the robber is invisible, i.e., the cops do not know his location until they capture him. Apparently this game (CiR) has received little attention in the CR literature. We…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Athanasios Kehagias , Dieter Mitsche , Pawel Pralat

We study a game of pursuit and evasion introduced by Seager in 2012, in which a cop searches the robber from outside the graph, using distance queries. A graph on which the cop wins is called locatable. In her original paper, Seager asked…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-02-13 Richard A. B. Johnson , Sebastian Koch

A relational characterization of cop-win graphs was provided by Nowakowski and Winkler in their seminal paper on the game of Cops and Robbers. As a by-product of that characterization, each cop-win graph is assigned a unique ordinal, which…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-05-16 Anthony Bonato , Przemysław Gordinowicz , Gena Hahn

A gambler moves on the vertices $1, \ldots, n$ of a graph using the probability distribution $p_{1}, \ldots, p_{n}$. A cop pursues the gambler on the graph, only being able to move between adjacent vertices. What is the expected number of…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2017-01-09 Jesse Geneson

We provide a sublinear bound on the cop throttling number of a connected graph. Related to the graph searching game Cops and Robbers, the cop throttling number, written $\mathrm{th}_c(G)$, is given by…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2019-01-28 Anthony Bonato , Sean English

We present two efficient algorithms that compute the optimal strategy for cop in the game of Cop v.s. Gambler where the gambler's strategy is not optimal but known to the cop. The first algorithm is analogous to Bellman-Ford algorithm for…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-01-11 Shen-Fu Tsai

These are some personal notes about the pursuit game of Cops and Robbers that I made starting in 2007. More old and new problems (and some solutions) will be added in future versions of these notes.

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-11-01 Bojan Mohar

Mohar recently adapted the classical game of Cops and Robber from graphs to metric spaces, thereby unifying previously studied pursuit-evasion games. He conjectured that finitely many cops can win on any compact geodesic metric space, and…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-09-08 Agelos Georgakopoulos

The Maker-Breaker domination game is a positional game played on a graph by two players called Dominator and Staller. The players alternately select a vertex of the graph that has not yet been chosen. Dominator wins if at some point the…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-06-24 Guillaume Bagan , Eric Duchêne , Valentin Gledel , Tuomo Lehtilä , Aline Parreau

A team of $r$ {\it revolutionaries} and a team of $s$ {\it spies} play a game on a graph $G$. Initially, revolutionaries and then spies take positions at vertices. In each subsequent round, each revolutionary may move to an adjacent vertex…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2015-08-06 Daniel W. Cranston , Clifford D. Smyth , Douglas B. West

This paper introduced a pursuit and evasion game to be played on a connected graph. One player moves invisibly around the graph, and the other player must guess his position. At each time step the second player guesses a vertex, winning if…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2017-01-24 John Haslegrave

We consider a search and rescue game introduced recently by the first author. An immobile target or targets (for example, injured hikers) are hidden on a graph. The terrain is assumed to dangerous, so that when any given vertex of the graph…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2023-04-10 Thomas Lidbetter , Yifan Xie

Pursuit-evasion games, such as the game of Revolutionaries and Spies, are a simplified model for network security. In the game we consider in this paper, a team of $r$ revolutionaries tries to hold an unguarded meeting consisting of $m$…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-06-12 Dieter Mitsche , Pawel Pralat

In the game of cops and robber, the cops try to capture a robber moving on the vertices of the graph. The minimum number of cops required to win on a given graph $G$ is called the cop number of $G$. The biggest open conjecture in this area…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-12-12 Pawel Pralat , Nick Wormald

We introduce the bodyguard problem for graphs. This is a variation of Surrounding Cops and Robber but, in this model, a smallest possible group of bodyguards must surround the president and then maintain this protection indefinitely. We…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-08-15 Nancy E. Clarke , Danny Dyer , William Kellough

In previous work, we introduced median decompositions, a generalisation of tree decompositions where a graph can be modelled after any median graph, along with a hierarchy of $i$-medianwidth parameters $(mw_i)_{i\geq 1}$ starting from…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-03-23 Konstantinos Stavropoulos

We present two zero-sum games modeling situations where one player attacks (or hides in) a finite dimensional nonempty compact set, and the other tries to prevent the attack (or find him). The first game, called patrolling game, corresponds…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-07-03 Tristan Garrec

A \emph{periodic graph} ${\cal G}=(G_0, G_1, G_2, \dots)$ with period $p$ is an infinite periodic sequence of graphs $G_i = G_{i + p} = (V,E_i)$, where $i \geq 0$. The graph $G=(V,\cup_i E_i)$ is called the footprint of ${\cal G}$.…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-10-30 Jean-Lou De Carufel , Paola Flocchini , Nicola Santoro , Frédéric Simard

A hole in a graph is an induced cycle of length at least 4. We give a simple winning strategy for t-3 cops to capture a robber in the game of cops and robbers played in a graph that does not contain a hole of length at least t. This…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2020-01-03 Vaidy Sivaraman

The Maker-Breaker domination game (MBD game) is a two-player game played on a graph $G$ by Dominator and Staller. They alternately select unplayed vertices of $G$. The goal of Dominator is to form a dominating set with the set of vertices…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2025-12-10 Athira Divakaran , Tanja Dravec , Tijo James , Sandi Klavžar , Latha S Nair